Updike’s Everyman Sold Toyotas - New York Times Blogs
Mr. Updike’s Rabbit books, beginning with “Rabbit, Run,” trace the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. In “Rabbit Redux,” set in 1979, Angstrom ends up running a Toyota dealership in the fictional Brewster, Pa., and becomes quite wealthy.
By the last book of the series, “Rabbit at Rest,” set mostly in the late 1980s, Rabbit’s son is in charge of the dealership and has run it into the ground, thanks to his coke addiction. Toyota revokes the franchise.
Mr. Updike did not necessarily love the cars. “Toyota, let’s face it, has about the styling imagination of a gerbil,” he has one character grumble. A notice in the front of the last Rabbit novel carefully noted that “No actual Toyota agency in southeastern Pennsylvania is known to the author or in any way depicted herein …”
The dealership was not Mr. Updike’s only depiction of the automotive world. He describes a Volkswagen factory in his 1994 novel “ Brazil ,” an experiment in South American-style magic realism. In that book, Mr. Updike’s heroine is put to work in a factory in Brazil building the Beetle, or as it is called in Portuguese, Fusca. Mr. Updike describes the factory as a “giant shed, whose northern end, like a hungry mouth, took in Volkswagen parts and whose southern end, like a tireless anus, emitted completed fuscas.”
